Internet Explorer problems

[wedge22]

Ok in my workplace we use pc's to register new cars and tax them, unfortunately our IT guy is useless and his normal solution to any problem is just to disable to the program causing it. This means that my colleagues pc has not had its antivirus updated for 324 days. Her pc also has firefox and IE on it, this is because she needs IE to goto certain websites. Unfortunately IE is not connecting to the web but firefox is, but firefox does not work on the websites that she needs. Please help.

[directhex]

hire a competant IT support technician, and wait a few days

the IE issue i'm almost certain will be spyware inserting a dodgy proxy server somewhere along the line (which is no longer online)

spyware removal has moved on from the old "run ad-aware" rule, since ad-aware can remove less than 50% of modern threats (spybot is barely any better).

[wedge22]

Ok mate unfortunately I do not control who employs the guy, he even uses win xp home edition for the pc's here and not pro. I did not know that ad aware and spybot were so useless now, what do you use to check for spyware now then.

[directhex]

i don't run windows, i don't get spyware problems

as it stands, those machines REALLY need reformatting. if he knows what he's doing, the mechanisms should be in place to run all the updates & things off a local SUS server anyway.

last i read, there was a paid antispyware app which managed close to 75% removal, but i don't remember the details.

you could try the beta of microsoft's app?

[wedge22]

Fair enough mate you know what you are doing but this guy is a tool. Its bloody important that we get it right as the pc has to go onto the internet alot. I will ask him about a SUS server, I imagine he has no idea what they are, ( neither do I). Where can I get the beta of the MS spyware tool.

[directhex]

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserv...s/default.mspx

http://www.microsoft.com/athome/secu...e/default.mspx

[eldren]

Do be careful with that Microsoft Anti-spyware beta with regard to batch scripts, though.

A colleague at work yesterday ran his usual script to update our in-house DLLs from a local server. In the process, it deletes the existing DLLs and then copies over the new ones. Microsoft's Anti-spyware beta caught the script launch, and asked whether or not it should be allowed to run. Unfortunately, in the process, it changed the working directory to the System32 directory, so when my colleague responded "Yes, always" (Or something like that), the script proceeded to delete all of the Windows XP system DLLs. And surprisingly enough, XP let him do this. After about 5 hours of his machine being unbootable, we decided, luckily enough, to check the script and found that it makes backups of the DLLs before deleting them. So fortunately, we were able to get his machine working again.